Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic in Larissa ... - Concentric

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.2Sept. 2009: 309-336Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic inLarissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl 1Kate Chiwen LiuDepartment of English Language and LiteratureFu Jen Catholic University, TaiwanAbstractLarissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl resists the containment strategies of Canadianmulticulturalism by using hybridity both thematically and as a textual strategy.Thematically, the characters’ hybridity in SFG, resulting from genetic cloning,immigration and cultural commodification, reveals the power structures oftraditional China and a future North America, challenges the illusive stabilityof “home” and identity in both societies, and constructs a lesbian genealogyfrom the past to the future. Hybridity is also the text’s strategy ofcontextualizing and de-exoticizing its lesbian genealogy. The constructedlesbian genealogy is hybridized not only with the characters’ geneticallymixed bodies and identities embodying multiple positions, but also throughthe text’s plural beginnings, endings, lines of development as well as multipleintertexts. Besides pluralizing the meanings of “home,” furthermore, the texthybridizes and contextualizes a variety of elements traditionally associatedwith the “Oriental”: the mythic goddess Nu Wa, New Kubla Khan, the opiumden, ethnic foods (durian and salt fish) and exotic ornaments. Such a hybridgenealogy is thus contextualized because all the time-spaces the charactersexperience take on multiple social meanings pertaining to the exploitation andexoticization of Asian diaspora in the age of multinational capitalism. SaltFish Girl’s strategies of hybridization, then, are the “post-colonial anti-exotic”strategies that “re-politicize” the “exotic” elements to evade the Orientalistgaze supported by both capitalism and Canada’s official multiculturalism, andto empower its characters in their multi-layered social networks. At the end,however, the text asks, with its two open endings, a difficult question of howdifferences can be recognized and what recognition means.Keywordshybridity, Larissa Lai, Sal t Fish Girl, the post-colonial anti-exotic1 My heartfelt appreciation goes to Larissa Lai, for her illuminating answers to the questionsraised by me and my students, and to Guy Beauregard and the two anonymous reviewers for theirincisive critique of my paper at the different stages of its revision.

310 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336I. Official Multiculturalism vs. the “Postcolonial Anti-Exotic”Since its inception in 1971, Canadian multiculturalism has long been an objectof debate and contestation, 2 in response to which its focus has shifted fromcelebrating ethnic differences in the 70’s, managing diversity institutionally in the80’s, to ensuring equal rights and civic participation since the 90’s (Fleras 11-17).Although its ideal of equity, especially in terms of equal access to social resourcessuch as education, housing and work opportunities, is far from being realized,defenders of Canadian multiculturalism believe that in Canada “plural is possible”(Adam Gopnik in “Adam Gopnik vs. Malcolm Gladwell”), and that its society is“the most successful pluralist [one] on the face of our globe” (“Canada: 'A modelfor the world'”). On the other hand, as Fleras points out, official multiculturalism is“essentially a society-building exercise that seeks to de-politicize differencesthrough institutional accommodation” (20). In other words, there have beenattempts at trying to contain or reduce cultural diversities, so that Canadian societycan be “safe from diversity, safe for diversity” (21). For instance, a survey carriedout by Innovative Research Group in 2005 shows that 70% of the Canadianrespondents think that adapting to “the Canadian way of life” should be the priorityfor new immigrants (“Multicultural Canada in the 21 st Century”). Another exampleis the violent reaction against UBC professor Sunera Thobani after her speechagainst US imperialism in October, 2001. At the time when there is “a re-whiteningof Canadian identity and increased marginalization of its nonwhite minorities” (32),Thobani received harsh criticism and even personal attacks because, according toArat-Koc, she spoke as a “modern subject” but not as an “ethnic minority” in anOrientalized position assigned to her (46).The apparent “tolerance” shown toward cultural diversity in the multiculturalCanada can be seen a strategy of containment, hiding the nation’s externalboundaries and internal hierarchies, both of which become more discriminatory tovisible minorities at times of crisis, change and conflicts of interests. In the field ofliterary production, such efforts at containment can be perceived in the selectiveacceptance of works by writers of visible minorities, usually categorized as“immigrant writings.” As Christine Kim points out, Larissa Lai’s first novel, When2 See, for instance, Fernando’s summary of the debate, which became more heated because oftwo books, in particular: Neil Bissoondath's Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism inCanada (1994), and Richard Gwyn's Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness ofBeing Canadian (1995) 28-31. Huang also gives a detailed introduction to CanadianMulticulturalism, its history, myth, as well as the critiques and reconstructions it receives, 1-30.

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 311Fox is a Thousand, has not received the same levels of critical and commercialsuccess as Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, partly because the former—critiquing dominant representations of Asian Canadians within the nation anddisrupting discourses of Canadian multiculturalism, as it does—is not as “easilyexoticized” as the latter (154, 168). Kim thus argues that there is a need to designnew strategies to read this body of literary works so as to re-shape market trendsand reader expectations.Lai herself, as a matter of fact, is not unaware of this need to carve out a spacein and beyond contemporary Canadian literary canon. As can be seen from themany essays she has written, she positions herself against the containment strategiesof official multiculturalism, whose binarist logic even the identity politicsmovement 3 with which she was involved failed to evade. She points out that themulticulturalism of the Trudeau era was quite limited in terms of who or what wasaccepted: “only those kinds of safe difference that could be perceived ascommensurate with perceived ‘Canadian’ traits’ could enter sanctioned discourse”(“Corrupted Lineage” 43-44). In response, the identity politics movement refused toplay by these multiculturalist rules, and focused on “constructing empoweredidentities” for visible minorities (“Forward” 16; “Future Asians” 168). However,one problem with the identity politics movement, among others, was that inasserting one’s difference from the mainstream one reinforces the Self-Otherbinarism (“Political Animals” 149; “Corrupted Lineage” 44). For instance, theminority writers of that generation tried to break through the barriers of silence andarticulate the repressed history to the full. With all their critical intent, the historiesarticulated had to be subject to the selection logic of the publishing business andthose “favored” ones fed into the exoticist imagination of the reading public andtheir assumptions about a terrible Other/past or a liberated Self/present. 4 In writingher novels, therefore, Lai herself is quite wary of being trapped in this “racializedspace” of literary production and reception, which can be both empowering andpigeonholing.3 The identity politics movement was marked by a series of important events from late 1980sto early 1990s: the international film and video conference/symposium In Visible Colours (1989),the film and video conference/workshop About Face, About Frame (1992), the 1993 conferenceIt's a Cultural Thing and the very controversial national writers' conference in 1994, Writing ThruRace (See Gagnon).4 Lai points out, for instance, there is in Canadian publishing industry a preference fornarratives of “past injustice . . . or brutal histories of ‘over there’” (“Corrupted Lineage” 42). Theexamples she gives of the preferred ones are Disappearing Moon Café and The Jade Peony.

312 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336The dilemma Lai describes can be related to what Huggan calls “thepostcolonial exotic” in the global and Canadian markets. Huggan uses the term “thepostcolonial exotic” to mark the intersection of two regimes of values:postcolonialism, with its anti-colonial efforts, and postcoloniality, or thesocio-economic conditions of today’s postcolonial world and its global market (28).The intersection happens because inevitably any postcolonial texts have to enter themarket and be subject to its logic of selection, marketing, and, possibly, itsexoticism: that is, positing visible minorities as cultural strangers, or using the“rhetoric of fetishized otherness and sympathetic identification” to mask theinequality of the power relations without which the discourse [of self-empowering]could not function” (Huggan 13). Some postcolonial cultural texts such as SalmanRushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and AtomEgoyan’s Exotica, according to Huggan, use exoticism strategically or specularizemarginality to critique Orientalism only to partake of it inadvertently: these textsflaunt mythic, romantic-nostalgic or erotic images of exoticism “deridingly” at theirreaders/spectators to the effect of “[trapping] the unwary reader into complicitywith the Orientalisms of which the novel[s] so hauntingly [relate]” (77, 153).While I disagree with Huggan’s generalization about the “West,” hisconflation of a book’s market values and its meanings, and his quick readings ofsome of the postcolonial texts mentioned above 5 , he does point to the fine linesbetween commodification/consumption and Orientalist gaze on one side, andtranscultural understanding on the other, in an era when postcolonialism andpostcoloniality are overlapping and everything is commodified. Besides theexamples Huggan and Lai give of those in the favor of the publishing business andreading public with the mythic, erotic or historical, Goellnicht and Kim also pointout that South Asian Canadian novels by Mistry, Selvadurai and Mootoo arepopular partly because they describe racism happening in distant places but not inCanada (Kim 163). Although I don’t think that a postcolonial text’s popularitybespeaks its complicity with the capitalist logic of consumption and reification, thewhole process of distribution, marketing and canon formation can lead to reificationand objectification of the “others.” In such a multi-mediated network ofcommunication and circulation, how does a postcolonial writer/reader construct themarginalized without fixing them as objects of gaze? How does a text construct a5 For instance, he argues that Exotica “oscillates between the alternative poles of surreptitioussocial control and profoundly anti-social concealment,” ignoring the structure of community andsympathy established among the film’s marginalized characters, which is neither anti-social nor aform of concealment (151).

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 313“contact zone” (Susan Friedman 90) which supports multi-directional culturaltranslations and interactions but not simplification of the others—either as “thestrange” or “the familiar”—for “self”-empowerment and entertainment?Although a text’s meaning is produced out of some complicated processes ofencoding and de-coding, Lai’s work does attempt to avoid “[empowering] themedia machine to replicate the same trope” or fix the diasporic identities(“Corrupted Lineage” 44). According to Lai, to avoid the either-or trap ofracialization, she has tried in her work to “[construct] a consciously artificialhistory” (“Political Animals” 149). In her “artificial” history the “always alreadycoded” elements of diasporic Chinese culture should, I believe, be seen as beinghybridized and (inter-)textualized so that their histories are more spatialized andnetworked, than linear and teleological. More specifically, if some postcolonialwriters’ strategic use of exoticism and marginality can be co-opted because, forreaders, they remain “exotic”—strangely familiar and alluring objects offetishization and decontextualization—Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, I want to argue, adoptstwo strategies to avoid fixing its characters’ identities and re-inscribing them intothe logic of exoticization: first using a revisionary and hybridizing mode ofnarrating a creation myth to develop a non-linear lesbian genealogy, and then ahybridizing treatment of images and spaces to form a network of social issuesrelated to Chinese diaspora, past and present.Many critics have noted in Lai’s novels the border-crossing and hybridizingimpulses on the levels of subjectivity and genre, as well as their resonances withtoday’s world. Both Fu and Morris analyze the heterogeneity and transformations ofthe characters in When Fox is a Thousand (hereafter cited as Fox). Fu points outthat Fox “(trans)forms, (trans)poses, and (trans)genders her subjects and offers anarray of cross-cultural, -racial, -sexual, -gender identifications,” which “straddledifferent spheres and disrupt the sense of reality and complacency of those worlds”(157, 163). Morris analyzes how Fox uses both hybrid characters and “genericinterweaving”(71, 72) to defy categorization and question the predominantly whitemale gaze and control as represented by Blade Runner. In their analyses of Salt FishGirl (hereafter cited as SFG), Cuder-Domínguez analyzes its creative revision ofspeculative fiction to enable multiple constructions of Asian women’s subjectivity,while both Wong and Mansbridge see the hybrid characters as “the abject,” andtheir spaces and histories as the “unheimlich,” that subvert the homely space ofCanada. For Cuder-Domínguez, SFG envisions a “hopeful” future on the characters’personal level (127), whereas Wong and Mansbridge see the novel more as acritique of contemporary Canada, its exploitation of Chinese garment workers

314 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336(Wong), or the notion of Canada as “a homely nation” (Mansbridge 121). Tara Lee,besides analyzing the text’s critique of the complicity between science andcapitalism, uses the trope of cyborg on the hybrid identities and sees in them thepolitical possibility of creating new forms by “reading and re-reading the mixedorigin which is in their makeup” (214; emphasis added).To add to these critics’ analyses of the hybrid characters and genres in Lai’snovels, I will discuss hybridity as a process of hybridizing networking in SFG. Forme, SFG constructs a lesbian genealogy by not only revising and hybridizingtraditional creation myths, but also pluralizing and “spatializing” its plotlines so thatits “origin” and “memory” are mutually constructive. Also, SFG’s hybridizationinvolves connecting the “Chinese/Asian Canadian” spaces and signs in its textualnetwork so that they present both the problems and utopian possibilities of lesbianand diasporic hybrid identities while evading the fetishizing Orientalist gazesupported by both capitalism and Canada’s official multiculturalism. In whatfollows, I will first explain my usage of the concept of hybridity in relation to thedebates around it, and then delineate the textualized lesbian genealogy constructedin SFG, which is further hybridized by its use of “Chinese” signs and spaces.II. Hybridity in DebateSince its emergence in the nineteenth century, hybridity, or the forcing to growtogether of two distinct beings or cultural matters 6 , has been interestinglyproblematic as an analytic tool. Usually categorized into linguistic-cultural andgenetic-racial hybridity, hybridity has been an issue for debate, as the concept is6 Defined biologically, hybridity means “disruption and forcing together of any living things”(Young 26). Defined culturally, it means “the fusion of two hitherto relatively distinct forms,styles or identities, cross-cultural contact” (Kraidy 5). The anthropologist Brian Stross provides acomprehensive definition of the term which includes its original meaning and later extensions: “InLatin the hibrida was the offpring of a (female) domestic sow and a (male) wild boar. Thesemantic range of the word hybrid has expanded in more recent times to include the offspring of amating by any two unlike animals or plants. The cultural hybrid is a metaphorical broadening ofthis biological definition. It can be a person who represents the blending of traits from diversecultures or traditions, or even more broadly it can be a culture, or element of culture, derived fromunlike sources; that is, something heterogeneous in origin or composition” (254 emphasis added).Definition of hybridity has been modified and extended differently in different fields. For instance,Young points out that hybridization can begin with “forcing of a single entity into two or moreparts,” as in the operation of hybrid shares on the stock market (26). The “mixing” in hybriditycan be further differentiated into “fusion of differences” on the one hand, mixture of somethingalready syncretic on the other, with different degrees of remaining distinctness in between (SusanFriedman 85).

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 315associated biologically with miscegenation, cross-fertilization and hybrid vigor ingenetics, horticulture and biotechnology, and, culturally, with contamination,mimicry and cultural diversity in anthropology, colonial and postcolonial discourses.The term “hybridity” is heavily loaded also because, besides being used differentlyin the fields ranging from biotechnology to fashion, from music, literature to thestock market and car industry, it is engaged in cultural discourses on individual andcollective levels as something radical and transgressive, or as a matter of routineand everyday practices. Hybridization, likewise, involves co-optation andassimilation by the dominant cultures, inversion and subversion of the liminal,gradual creolization of languages, multiple border-crossing of the diasporic,mimicry, bricolage, parody and (re-)mixing-and-mediating of artistic styles, and,last but not the least, selection, modification and mixture of genes, foods, codes andstyles to produce commodities and construct identities on daily basis. 7Though dissociated more from its negative implications such as impurity andfragmentation now than before, hybridity is still a target of criticism for twointerrelated reasons: (1) that, as a conceptual tool, it is too ambiguous to betheoretically rigorous and (2) that, on the empirical level, it lacks “revolutionarypotential” (van der Veer 104). The use of hybridity can be ambiguous because, as adescriptive catchall term, it “fails to discriminate between the diverse modalities ofhybridity” (Stam 60). For the dissenters, the so-called “hybridity talk” is thus seenas “an ‘elite’ preoccupation” (Mukherjee 21) which “looks everywhere than thestreet” (Jonathan Friedman 75), where hybridity can be experienced painfully andwithout a choice by those in the lower rungs of the social ladder (the case ofmelamine-tainted milk powder erupting in the Fall of 2008 is a case in point).Politically, confirmation of cultural diversity can lead to tokenism, vertical mosaic,or, in post-apartheid South Africa, it can “come dangerously close to reproducingthe ideology of ‘separate development’ (Mathieson and Atwell qtd. in Brah andCoombes 2). In popular culture, moreover, cultural hybridity can be a selling point:as mixtures of exotic flavors in restaurant menus and fashion styles, or those of7 There have been several succinct overviews of the development of hybridity discourses. I amespecially indebted to Robert Young for his connecting cultural hybridity to its racial andbiological counterparts, and for his tracing its history to the nineteenth-century debates in geneticsand horticulture; to Susan Friedman, for her mapping of hybridity theory in terms of the types ofcultural mixing, its function, spatial and temporal orientation, as well as the power relationsinvolved; to Kapchan and Strong, for their connecting the concept to the related concepts ofsyncretism, bricolage and creolization; to Laura Moss, for suggesting a way to move beyond thetwo poles of hybridity discourses—contamination and celebration: seeing racial hybridity as anincreasingly ordinary state, and, further, to Marwan Kraidy, for providing examples ofhybridization in journalism, mass production and reception in global cultural exchanges.

316 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336ethnic “colors” in ads, interior decoration and spectacular shows for visualconsumption. For Hutnyk, therefore, hybridity is a political void, because “thispolitical project seems too often to have given way to an analysis of textualconstruction”; because “hybridity and difference sell; the market remains intact” (122).Despite and probably because of their ambivalence and complexity, thecultural phenomena of hybridity should continue to be understood and investigatedby us today in this globalizing world; it is a matter of how to develop strategies ofpresenting and reading hybridity. Undeniably, hybridization, to borrow Kraidy’sterm, is a “cultural logic of globalization”(148) that is happening on daily basis toalmost all the aspects of our lives—to such an extent that no food is not geneticallymodified 8 , no nation can be self-contained, and nobody can be 100 percent naturallyand purely “human.” In this global world of interconnectedness, it is a crucial wayof “self”-positioning to try to perceive and locate, negotiate and at times contest themultiple hybridizing forces in, on and around us, as well as to articulate theirdifferences and interconnections.The cultural relevancy of hybridity alone, however, does not justify its usageas an analytical tool. Conceptually, in my view, hybridity stimulates analysis of thepowers involved in and between the “mixtures” of various types, and thus helpsmap their power relations. Instead of dismissing the literary or cultural hybridworks as less disruptive or non-revolutionary (e.g. Hutnyk and van der Veer), thestudies of cultural hybridity should move beyond polarizing domination andtransgression/resistance, to examine the power structures involved in and aroundeach instance of hybridization. 9 Like Kraidy, I see hybridity as a discursiveformation, in which text and context are mutually constitutive, if not inseparable. 10From a discursive perspective, both the hybrid “text” and its “context” are dynamic,multi-layered, and with manifold interactions among its disciplinary, historical andempirical levels, just as the driving forces of hybridity—be they genetic8 Just as cultural critics argue that cultures have always been hybrid, according to SusanMcCouch, genetic modification has been done all the time in the history of plant breeding: “everycrop we eat today is genetically modified. Every one. . . . So don’t ask me what is natural andwhat is not.” (Didur 101).9 Cf. Kraidy 149. Kraidy’s approach is consistent with Susan Friedman’s third approach tohybridity; that is, after the “oppressional” model (hybridity imposed or erased) and“transgressional” model (hybridity as counter-hegemony), there is a “locational” approach—alocational “thick descriptions” of historically and geographically specific situations.10 Kraidy treats hybridity as a discursive formation, and in analyzing hybridity in interculturalcommunication he takes a contrapuntal approach: “each type [of hybridity] consonant with othertypes in some aspects and dissonant with other types in other regards, and yet all converging onthe notion of hybrity” (14).

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 317modification, traveling cultures, capital flows or global migration—collapseidentities, dissolve borders, and reterritorialize various political zones anddiscursive fields while maintaining their fluidity. It is the concept of hybridity thatpushes us to examine the resonances and interactions of the levels involved in eachinstance of hybridization.As a literary critic positioned in Taiwan and thus having less access to thematerialist conditions of the production and circulation of SFG, I choose to examinenot the structure of its production and circulation, but the multiple hybridizingforces within the text—which, for me, both presents and works against the attemptsat exoticization or containment of Canadian multiculturalism. From this analyticstance, I will examine how meanings get produced on and among different textuallevels, and ask text-specific questions about what social levels and power relationsget articulated, what meanings get produced (as the result of oppression, co-optationor subversion) and in order to serve which function—entertainment, indifferentdaily routine, bodily harms, or, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “translation thatkeeps open the questions . . . of home, identity and belonging” (“Halfway House” 3).In analyzing SFG, therefore, I will appropriate the notion of hybridity as aconceptual tool to help me link the various textual levels and historical moments inSFG of hybridization as either power control, or resistance or both. As apost-national science fiction which juxtaposes and connects the historic south Chinaand a future north America set in 2044 to 2062, the text has, as its frame ofreference, some contemporary instances of capitalist hegemony and two kinds ofhybridity: that of genetic modification and immigrants. 11 SFG, therefore,thematizes hybridity as an object of systemic control on some of the followinglevels: migration, global marketing, human creation, cloning and computersimulation, to reveal the extensiveness of their power and to challenge the illusivestability of “home” and identity. In the meantime, hybridization is also the text’sstrategy of the postcolonial anti-exotic. To counter mass media’s stereotyped orfetishized images of Asian/Chinese Canadian diaspora, the text hybridizes sometime-spaces of home, work and entertainment to “stage” the interrelations betweenracial and gender exploitation in different centuries; secondly, it presents thecharacters who, inhabiting or migrating to these time-spaces, embody and negotiatethe meanings of hybridity through their bodies and images, as well as in their family,11 What Lai apparently had in mind when writing the novel are: first, the corporate control,manipulation and simulation of animal, plant, and administrative district (i.e. Dolly the clonedsheep, Monsanto’s control of wheat gene, a Texan company’s patenting of slightly modifiedbasmati rice and Disney’s construction of a small town Celebration), and second, the news of theChinese “boat people” who arrived on the British Columbia coast (“Future Asians” 171-72).

318 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336work and love relations. In writing the stories of the past and the future into the“unheimlich” present, Lai, however, does not give a realistic or utopian account ofthe history of oppression and resistance; rather, she writes into this history the“corrupted body-double” of Nu Wa and Salt Fish Girl, Miranda and Evie, who gothrough uncanny time-spaces which are “really the present. . . . contemporarycorruptions of texts that have been and texts that are yet to be” (“CorruptedLineage” 48). Lai’s “corruption” or revision of Chinese cultural texts, as I will showlater, is what I call the “postcolonial anti-exotic” strategies of hybridization, whichpluralize or transform some types and stereotypes of the “Chinese” in NorthAmerica in order to subvert the original hierarchy of purity and impurity, blur theline between normality and abnormality, and pluralize the meanings of the targets ofexoticization—Oriental goddess and girls, cabaret club, opium den, strange bodies,“odd habits and foul smells” (48)—and place them in some hybrid spaces ofnegotiation.III. Lesbian Genealogy HybridizedSFG challenges almost everything that constitutes a stable sense of identity:from a stable home and community, a unified human origin and linear history, toour bodily and behavioral senses of integrity. Both Nu Wa and Miranda Ching aredisplaced from “home” several times, while the families or communities they formget broken either by the authorities or because of their own betrayals. Such a senseof displacement and precarious belonging is inevitable in the “homespace” Laicarves out for diasporic Chinese lesbian women. For one thing, the “homespace,” asmentioned above, is located in the liminal or the “unheimlich” spaces of the nation(or post-national society). Also, this “homespace” does not have as support thelinear trajectory of nationalist history; instead, composed of stories from the gaps ofhistory, it has to be “loose, chaotic and contradictory,” bespeaking the disjuncturesand discontinuities of [Chinese diaspora’s] histories (Lai, “Political” 149; Morris,“Sites of articulation” 23). Despite, and also because of, their contradictions anddisjunctions, these spaces allow for Chinese diasporic characters’ and the text’snegotiations of multiple textual and intertextual meanings in terms of birth, home,work and representation. In this section I will discuss how “birth,” or origin, andmemory get hybridized both genetically and textually to carve out a homespace forlesbian coalition without fixed identities.The “birth” or originary moment—of a person or a nation—is traditionallyseen as the moment that defines the unifying essence of a personal or national

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 319identity. In SFG, however, there are not only multiple origins, presented “as areiterative process of splitting, doubling, and remembering” (Mansbridge 125), butalso gaps and recurrences, divergences and convergences in each of the three storiesof birth (Nu Wa’s making of humans, Miranda’s birth, and her giving birth to a babygirl with Evie at the end), radically revising the traditional concepts of birth as theoriginary moment signifying God’s or biological parents’ love. Nu Wa’s story ofhuman creation, first of all, has in it multiple starts and stops, and implies evenmore. Nu Wa could have aborted her “creation,” had the creatures not survived heranger. Also, her work finds repetitions and echoes in and beyond the text. The firstrepetition, on the second page, is that of the opening line, “In the beginning therewas just me”– a line that obviously echoes Genesis but is here desanctified by itsassociations with what Nu Wa describes as the stink of “the river and a rotten-eggsmell” (2). The “history” of creation is then repeated in Nu Wa’s mind, when, tofind a way to fight humans’ aging, she retreats to her cave and “dream[s] of”humans’ origins and “remember[s] all the details of their creation (5). Finally, morerepetitions are suggested when Nu Wa, happy with her creation, reveals that this isher “latest project” (6).The creation story of Nu Wa’s keeps being hybridized as the text invokes oneintertext after another. First of all, the text allows a feminist comparison betweenNu Wa as a creator and her male counterparts. Unlike Frankenstein, she helps hercreatures when she can, although she also finds her creations “monstrous” and thecreatures’ wallowing in the mud a bit disgusting (3-5). Unlike Confucius, whom NuWa refers to as her successor, Nu Wa does not worry about moral restraints when itcomes to sexual pleasure; she sees procreation as a function “secondary” to sexualpleasure (5). Also unlike Confucius (and the Christian God), Nu Wa makes womenstronger than men.The lesbian connotations of Nu Wa’s story start to emerge as we find her“human” and in a state of longing for a companion. Instead of being the selflessgoddess setting up the heterosexual marriage system in the traditional Chineselegend, Nu Wa creates humans out of loneliness, slits their tails when being angeredby their laughing at her tail, creates more humans in a desperate attempt to find onewith “a little respect” (3), and, once her creatures know how to kiss and copulate,envies them and wants to experience their “joys and sorrows” (6). This desire forrecognition is even more pronounced by her speaking to “you”—meaning first thereader and then her creatures—asking for our/their understanding and seekingcommunication.

320 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336This theme of desire and recognition takes on a lesbian dimension in the text’ssubsequent revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Little Mermaid,”through a sequence of face gazing and recognition. Compared with crossing the linebetween the human and the sea world, Nu Wa’s migration seems easier, as sheswims through the river leading to a pool, another river, and then to a cold greenlake, all fluid spaces without fixed boundaries. At the cold green lake, however, aline is drawn with the glassy surface of the water between the self under the water,and the other one above it. With this mirror-like lake surface, the text shifts themermaid’s yearning for an unknowing prince in Andersen’s story to a mutual gazebetween a self and its other: while the face above is surprised to see beneath itsreflection another face, Nu Wa recognizes a lonely and private face (7). Moredivergence from the mermaid fairy tale happens after the bifurcation of Nu Wa’s tailinto human feet, as she turns to notice on a nearby rock a woman with a face likethe gazing male face and with translucent feet like hers, seeming to suggest thatanother fish-human (or heterosexual-homosexual?) transformation has occurred as aresult of a similar longing.Developing less through plot than through intertextual ramifications, thehuman creation of Nu Wa, followed by the “transmigration,” or rebirth, of her andanother woman, seemingly begins a lesbian genealogy which then develops throughthe motif of yearning for and recognition of physical affinity and love, andculminates in remembering previous lives and engendering a new one. Thisgenealogy is far from being a singular-linear or progressive one, since the doubleplotlines of the two lesbian couples interrupt each other to make “history” develop“spatially”—back and forth in time through repetitions and textual revisions (As Iwill discuss in the next section, the two plotlines, filled with interruptions bybetrayals and obstacles, get hybridized through images and in spaces to take onmore diasporic and class implications). Even the motif of recognition suggestsrecognition/remembering across time, allowing the backward movement ofremembering to happen simultaneously as the genealogy develops onward to apossible future.Recognition, first of all, is that of both physical affinity and of multiple“mothers” for a reconstruction of hybrid lesbian selves. Both Nu Wa and Mirandarecognize their lovers through their smell: Nu Wa falls for the Salt Fish Girl becauseof the latter’s stinky fishy odor she has, while Miranda recognizes Evie the momentshe smells a whiff of “familiar fragrance, briny and sweet”: “It’s you, ” she says(105). Another biological resemblance becomes apparent after their first sexualintercourse, when Miranda finds out that Evie, like her mother and herself, has a

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 321fistula behind her ear. In the meantime, Miranda “[remembers] another longer,leaner shape” (163)—that of Nu Wa, thus forming a connection between the twodaughters and the two “mothers.”Does this connection through physical affinity, then, suggest a kind ofbiological determination? I don’t think so. Apart from the cultural connotations of(fishy) smell and cloning, which I will get to in the next section, suffice it to sayhere that the act of recognition means empowerment through coalition andhistorical reconstruction, rather than biological determinism. For one thing, whenNu Wa recognizes Salt Fish Girl, and when Miranda recognizes Evie, they empowerboth the women of lower classes, and, through such affiliation, themselves. NuWa’s empowerment of the other women also starts with recognition: she“recognizes” both of the women she impregnates—the first one as an old-timeworshipper of hers, and the second one, “[her] mother” (208). When Nu Wa callsAimee her mother, the two plotlines (of Nu Wa and Miranda) converge and alesbian genealogy is both confirmed and revealed to be a “constructed” one. Thisgenealogy is an artificial construction because, immediately after Nu Wa has said,“I became the seed and the seed became me. Whatever grows from it will be mine”(209), we see Miranda in the next chapter overwhelmed by her memories, whichseems to suggest that it is Miranda who remembers/reconstructs such a foremother.Although what Miranda dreams/remembers is never specified, it could very well bethe story of Nu Wa, since both of them are obviously searching for their “mothers”and “daughters,” one looking forward and the other backward. Miranda’s happensin her mind when she and Evie head on to the final creation scene: “I’m yourgrandmother . . . I am the maker of your maker,” denying the paternal authority ofDr. Flower but also re-confirming a lesbian genealogy which is both recurrent andself-engendering (253). In this constructed lesbian genealogy—one which isconfirmed in Miranda and Nu Wa’s mutual recognition/identification throughAimee and Evie—therefore, the line of development is both forward-moving andcircular.The constructedness of this lesbian genealogy, together with its multiplepossibilities, is further suggested in the sequence of drawings Miranda producesafter her first sexual intercourse with Evie. Filled with her love for Evie, Mirandaconfirms through her drawings the line of matriarchal lineage between her mother,the little mermaid and Nu Wa. Her drawings, moreover, involve some bolderrevisions of traditional patriarchal stories: she offers a lesbian re-vision of human“origins” by having Fu Xi, Nu Wa’s brother, androgynous and “almost identical”with Nu Wa; she creates a more obviously lesbian plot out of “The Little Mermaid”

322 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336by having the woman the little mermaid meets on the shore embrace her. Finally,metafictional references are made in the drawings where Nu Wa’s creation becomesa literary one (the humans’ becoming words), and biological reproduction orcloning (Nu Wa’s birthing brought down to the level of cell multiplication).The final scene of birthing can be seen as a realization, after all the betrayalsand disruptions, of one of Miranda’s revisions of the Nu Wa story (that of the NuWa-Fu Xi drawing). It is also a “hybrid” ending in more than one way. First of all, itrevises another creation myth, that of scientists’ creation of cyborg and clone, byhaving Miranda and Evie‘s journey parallel that of the cyborg Roy’s in BladeRunner. Before they reach the birthing place, Miranda and Evie visit the differentsites of the cloning industry, from Dr. Flower’s building to the aquarium (where oneof Evie’s “mothers,” the carp, and the other fish are kept), to the shacks for theproduction of male human clones resembling Dr. Flowers, and, finally, to the snailcabin for keeping DNA and fertilizing eggs. Evie visits her father, Dr. Flower, toseek revenge, in a way that recalls the cyborg Roy’s, and by extension, the othermonsters’, clones’ and cyborgs’ search for and/or rebellion against their scientist“fathers” in novels and films ranging from Frankenstein and Artificial Intelligence,to Island. Roy’s and Evie’s journeys include a visit to the father (Tyrell and Dr.Flower respectively) in their buildings, which loom large above the surroundingsprawling buildings (SFG 253); a visit to a Chinese man (named Chew and Chang),who turns out respectively to have been involved in the production of the cyborgs’eyeballs and genes. However, the similarities end here; while Roy goes through asequence of brutal killings which still cannot stop his own demise, Evie only injuresher father and goes to Chang for “maternal” nourishment. What is more, she stopsMiranda from killing the male clones, before the two of them witness the “mud andmuck” of human origins in the snail cabin, thus making the two women’s journey tothe “origins” altogether different from that of Roy, with its structure of killings,heroic rescue (of Deckard) and death.Besides revising sci-fi fiction’s story of male scientists’ creation, the birthingat the end seems to return to and rewrite the two other birthing moments of thenovel. Unlike the cold green lake Nu Wa was in when seeing and yearning for thegazing face above, here Miranda and Evie jump into a bubbling hot spring;reversing the process of Nu Wa’s transformation, here both of them have their scaleback on their skin, their feet fused, and then their tails entangled with each otherlike Fu Xi and Nu Wa. Unlike the immaculate conception of Miranda’s mother,Miranda and Evie’s coupling results in the birth of a black-hair girl, a hybrid born

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 323out of two hybrids: Evie, with her sources traced to a Chinese woman, a Japaneseman and a carp, and Miranda, a mixture of the Nu Wa seed and her Chinese parents.Unlike the genetic complexities of Miranda and Evie’s daughter, Miranda’sbirth marks a period of emotional complexity in her family history and underminesits father-son patriarchal lineage. If the dominant image of the first and the last birthmoments is water, in Miranda’s description of her birth, it is the mirror andphotographic/video images that mark the beginning (a week before her conception)and the end (at age four) of the short-lived romance happening to her parents, andthus suggesting the cultural conditioning of this family. Miranda’s search for herorigins in the photographer-father’s loving gaze is misdirected, as it leads her onlyto find an empty lens. When viewing the video the mother watches, Miranda, again,hopes to see the camera focus on her father. The camera, instead, focuses on “a veryhandsome dark-haired man” whose eyes are full of Aimee. This video thus points tothe family’s secret past which confuses its patra-lineage. From the argumentsbetween the parents, we get to know that this man jilted Aimee and later became afamous doctor in Painted Horse. Could this person be Dr. Flower? Although the textdoes not confirm such a coincidence, Miranda’s brother, Aaron, does suspect Dr.Flower to be his father (97), which, again, undermines the legitimacy of thenominal father.IV. Hybridized Images and SpacesSFG is far from being just a lesbian utopia fiction; once we consider thehybrid images and spaces associated with the characters, the already disrupted andhybridized line of lesbian genealogy takes on more meanings on the levels ofdiaspora and multinational capitalism. The images of durian and salt fish, water andmemory, and mirror and video connect the characters to one another and to theirsocieties, which, together with their hybrid spaces of birth, home, work andrepresentation, form a network of interconnectedness to reveal to the issues of raceand gender exploitation, industrial and techno-corporate capitalism the charactersare involved in.The first group of images, the traditionally exotic foods of durian and salt fish,get placed together with the other non-cultural images to form a network ofmeanings and develop different implications. Durian and salt fish, on the one hand,are transformed in the text from exotic and stinky foods to something supporting thelesbian genealogy: respectively as fertility seed and a sign for recognition. On theother hand, they also take on different meanings related to the characters’ ideologies

324 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336and material existence. While durian and fish, as discussed above, connect the fourfemale characters, they also serve to separate Nu Wa and Miranda from theirbiological mothers. Durian is the fruit that causes the five-year romance betweenAimee and her husband, Stewart, but that cannot change their different ideologicalpositions regarding the fruit: it is an evil fruit for Stewart, but for Aimee, it isseductive because the smell of “something forbidden smuggled on board” (13)reminds her of her childhood experience. Durian, moreover, serves to separateMiranda from Aimee through the latter’s accidental death, which, in my view,reveals less the workings of fate than the harsh materialist conditions they liveunder in the grocery store.Another way to interpret the materialist conditioning of food is that althoughit serves to break the links between the daughters and their patriarchal families, italso helps forge another one among women-identified women. According to Nu Wa,in South China’s villages, salt fish is a common cheap food used to wean baby girls,just as sesame pudding is used by her mother to sweeten up the matchmaker. Inother words, food is provided not so much for nourishment, as for some practicalpurposes of distancing the girls from other people and marrying them off. Nu Waadds to this typical destiny of daughter’s being “married out” (like spilt water) apsychological dimension: the weaning happens so early because psychologically themothers have to be prepared, so that later they will be the “agent[s]” of theirseparation (51). Nu Wa’s story, however, is revised so that it is not just a typicalstory with a fixed marriage plot. Not only does Nu Wa see through the mother’sattempts at separation and declare spinsterhood to forestall them, she turns activelyto love salt fish and Salt Fish Girl—and the stink which “[makes her] want to livemore than ever” (56).Besides invoking multiple intertext, one of the text’s hybridizing andanti-exotic strategies, then, is to mix new elements into the images traditionallyconnected to the characters, the plots and the spaces they are in—so that thehybridized images, plots and spaces can resist stereotyping or fixing while retainingtheir historical and materialist implications. As these cultural images are alsoassociated with images which are culturally non-specific and thus not easy targetsof exoticization—for instance, the second image group, water and memory, the textfurther expands on their implications both along the lines of feminist genealogy andsocial implication. For instance, durian smell and fish/sea memory are thesymptoms of Miranda’s dreaming disease, a “disease” revealing the hybrid andunruly reality of the highly rationalized world of Big Six regime. In this way,Miranda’s durian smell and intensive water/fish memories connect her

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 325diachronically through the sea to Nu Wa and her past lives, and synchronically, tothose contemporaries with dreaming (or drowning) disease, which thus provides abroader social context for her problem. Diachronically, water is the means of NuWa’s migration and impregnation-reincarnation which finally reaches andempowers Miranda, who, on the other side, remembers. Parallel to Nu Wa’sdrowning in the water and being caged by it, Miranda is captured in a water closet,which induces in her more intensive memories than she can bear. Synchronically,the dreaming disease that Miranda contracts serves to reflect contemporary socialproblems of the Big Six. For one thing, it is an epidemic spreading from PaintedHorse to Serendipity and Unregulated Zone, suggesting that the areas’ boundariesare porous at best and that Saturna’s attempts at repressing the news is futile.Secondly, there are many collateral signs of the walled city’s collapse – for instance,workers being laid off, people dying under the bridges, the wall being blasted awayand New Kubla Khan being riddled with bullet holes (85-6, 191). The studies of the“disease,” moreover, point to Big Six’s excessive technological manipulation ofhuman, plant and animal lives as the suspected causes of this disease: that thedisease can be transmitted from genetically altered plants, or animals, or that thedisease may be intentionally manufactured (102). Moreover, as an inverted mirror,some of its “symptoms” seem to be the “return” of either the repressed or of thosediscriminated against. For instance, these patients’ scaly skin, suicidal tendenciesand nightmares with historical content—about the wars, diseases andfantasies—seem to be psychosomatic responses to the excessive repressiveness ofthis highly rationalized society. In this highly rationalized world, everything issupposed to be normal, stainless (read: memory-less) and odor-free. Besidestraumatic histories and “abnormal” physical conditions, the strange and exotic arealso repressed and excluded; for instance, Miranda’s durian smell, which is “stinky”and forbidden to those (Westerners and Serendipity citizens) for whom the fruit isAsian and exotic. Also forbidden, however, is acquiring the odors of some “natural”materials and “freshly” made foods (for instance, the odors of oranges, tobacco,cabbage, silk, cotton, coffee, milk, freshly baked bread, and of “dust and rain andmud” (70), which become as problematic as those of blood and carnage, machineoil and rotten eggs.The hybrid spaces of the characters’ workplaces and home address capitalistconsumption of the Oriental more directly. The first hybrid space I will discuss hereis the factory district in Canton (today's Guangzhou), where Nu Wa and Salt FishGirl arrive after their escape from their villages. It is in this border space that thesetwo begin to go their separate ways: the Salt Fish Girl stays marginalized in the

326 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336system, first working in a factory and later becoming a white-hair woman rejectedby society, while Nu Wa continues to cross such boundaries as the legal ones inpickpocketing and smuggling, as well as the geographical ones in observing thefactories from outside, in going to the Land of Mist and Forgetfulness, and thenback from it as one with a foreign tongue. This journey through one surreal hybridspace after another has the effect of reproducing certain vignettes of the traveling ofAsian Canadian people and goods, in which the factory is one of the major nodes.Beauregard very shrewdly points out that having a “Malaysian” girl in the factoryarea is a piece of anachronism, which I would use to support my argument that thewhole description of the factory district, like that of the Land of Mist andForgetfulness (with its allegorical names and Nu Wa’s use of credit cards in earlytwentieth century), is surreal but relevant to today’s global markets. The relevancyis suggested, first of all, in the text’s making a link between the “here” of Miranda(the toy stores in North American) and the “there” of Nu Wa (the factories inCanton) by letting the same type of wind-up toys appear in both places. A link canalso be perceived between “then” and “now” if we relate the young and old femalefactory laborers in Canton to today’s sweatshops in the same area. 12 While theresults of cheap labor today can be the products of the international corporationssuch as Disney and Nike, the products produced then—rattan products includingbird cages, and paper products such as opera masks, luscious flowers and exoticanimals (118)—are those easily feeding into Orientalism (218). Lai’s anti-exoticstrategy in this case is to implicate Nu Wa as a viewer who is first detached andthen involved. Looking at the factory workers through one window after another,Nu Wa does not notice the workers’ bleary eyes or wasted bodies, so she finds thework a good one for them, and herself disengaged with “a strange sense ofbodilessness . . . to the point where [she disappears] into the act of watching” (118).Her “romanticization” of Oriental factories—or beautification of the object of hergaze in detachment—evaporates the moment Nu Wa recognizes Salt Fish Girlamong the workers and gets shocked by the panic on her face. In this brief textualmoment, Nu Wa’s non-engaging romanticization of factory work is incurred by thedistance and the speed in which she looks at the workers—a problem TV viewerslike us could very likely have when watching the news in the comfort of our livingrooms.12 According to Ching Kwan Lee, “China has become the world's new ‘global factory,’ withthe southern province of Guangdong (including Hong Kong) as its powerhouse. Millions ofwomen workers are toiling in sweat shops and modern factories, churning out Mickey Mouse toys,Barbie dolls, Nike sports shoes, Apple jeans, watches, radios, televisions, and computers forworldwide consumption” (1).

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 327Besides pluralizing the meanings of the signs which are traditionallysusceptible to exoticization such as durian and salt fish, SFG places Orientalornaments like masks, paper flowers and animals back to where they are producedto reveal the sweat and hardship involved. With the third set of images, mirror andvideo, surface another major target of Orientalism: Chinese-North-Americanwomen in two spaces of self-display, at home and at New Kubla Khan. Miranda’sself-denial is expressed in her reluctance to see herself in the mirror after hermother’s death, while Aimee Ling is quite pre-occupied with her mirror image. Thismirror image, however, reveals more of Aimee’s social conditioning than it does herself, as is exemplified in the video that she plays on a computer in front of hervanity mirror when in retreat from the temporary romance with Stewart. Aimee’sglorious moment is definitely a thing of the past, twice removed from her time ofviewing it because of its double framing: the temporal frames marked by the oldmachine—“a scratchy CD-ROM . . . on an equally decaying laptop”—used forplaying it, and the ideological framing of the Running Dog TV company, whoseposition is revealed in the announcer’s saying that Unregulated Zone is “very verydangerous” (19, 20). The second kind of framing is the construction of Aimee Lingthrough her career as a cabaret girl, her costume (“shimmery sequinned redcheongsam” 19) and the song she sings (Nancy Kwan’s “Fan Tan Fanny” fromFlower Drum Songs). There is, actually, a third frame in the video: that of thegazing man’s irises, which show “two tiny reflections” of Aimee (20).Does the video capture and eternalize a glorious moment? Does the male gazespeak love? Or do both of them actually capture and confine Aimee? The video as atext produces two contradictory female images because of its intertextual referenceto the song from Flower Drum Songs: one, constructed by the lyrics, is anindependent Fanny, who leaves one man for another (“Fan Tan Fanny was leavingher man . . . Fan Tan Fanny has found a new guy”) and the other, the image of thehighly feminized, sexy and mirror-loving Linda Low most marked by the song “IEnjoy Being a Girl.” 13 To add the other two songs attributed to Aimee in the text:“A Song for Clara Cruise” (24, 91) and “Dim Sum Daydreams” (197), the cultural13 That the musical film Flower Drum Song helps consolidate the stereotype of Oriental girl asnaïve, pliable and sexually available has been noted by many scholarly works. To name just a few:Lisa Lowe argues that the image of Linda Low in front of the mirror in the song “I Enjoy Being aGirl” “both relies on and reproduces a common belief: that Asian women embody the hyperfeminine” (37); Blank notes how many Asian American women feel that they are perceived as“pliable and sexually available,” because of the stereotypes of Oriental women presented in thefilms such as Sayonara, Teachouse of the August Moon, The World of Suzie Wong, Flower DrumSong, and The Deer Hunter (43).

328 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336significance of Aimee Ling’s performances as a popular cabaret singer is even moreambiguous. On the one hand, “Dim Sum Daydreams” seems to present fantasiesderiving from another Oriental sign, dim sum; on the other, “A Song for ClaraCruise” revises Anderson’s fairy tale “Red Shoes,” shifts the focus from the girl’sfinal salvation to the fetishized red shoes closer: “Shoes danced the bones till theywere dust . . . The pretty shoes of Clara Cruise/Dance empty not so far away” (92;emphasis added) 14 . On the personal level, then, Aimee Ling seems to be caught inthe midst of these contradictory cultural meanings: she seems to be able to critiquethe power of shoes as commodity fetish but then leads a life of self-pity borne of afading glory, and of mourning for the now-absent male gaze (her society’s and,more specifically, her first lover’s).Far from being a private space for the family members, Miranda’s home isone penetrated by capitalist and statist powers, producing plural spaces withcontradictory cultural meanings to compromise its residents’ positions. Besides themother’s vanity, two other spots at home reveal similar social complications in thecharacters’ use of electronic devices: the father’s basement workplace, where avideo monitor and a Business Suit are used for him to enter a virtual reality for taxcollection, and the house’s back step, where Miranda reads her electronic books,Forbidden Tales, and likes especially to design ways for the snow princess toescape. The father at work follows the scripted plotline of being a rescuer first andthen being beaten up by policemen, while Miranda is the one to choose differentplotlines in her story book, and reverse the father’s at work. As Wong points out,both this middle-class household and the grocery store in the Unregulated Zone are“sites of crisis, or heterotopias, that reveal how contested and contradictorydomestic spaces can be” (112). And I would add that the contradictions compromisethe characters without fixing them. While both parents have their moments ofdeviation from Serendipity (i.e. one for the love of durian and the other for Chineseherbs) and loyalty to it (i.e. one for its medical system, and the other, its foodsystem), it is Miranda that finally breaks through the corporate capitalist control.With Aimee’s video the reader is taken to another hybrid space, New KublaKhan, an obviously commodified and exoticized space in which both the motherand the daughter fall prey to different kinds of mainstream constructions of(Chinese-North American) women. In Miranda’s time, however, the spectacles are alot more mixed than what is presented in Aimee’s video. Besides Miranda’s singingher mother’s song in her cheongsam, there are a magic show (of a woman’s bodily14 In the original story by Andersen, Karen ascends to heaven after her heart breaks with peaceand joy. Then nobody asks after the red shoes.

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 329fragmentation), a sentimental piano performance (by Chinese child prodigy), and anerotic bubble-bath tub singing (by a cyborg Sonia). Physical fragmentation andbubble bath are typical tricks used in spectacularization of women’s bodies in magic,films and ads. Textually, however, these entertaining spectacles are connected tosome brutal scenes of bodily fragmentation and exploitation—the juggling oforgans on the one hand, and Sonias’ laboring in the factories—thus exposing theircommon reality of instrumentalization of female bodies. But why do theperformances include the child prodigy’s piano piece and Miranda’s singingAimee’s song? As I see it, the one follows the logic of “decontexualization” inexoticism, while the other paves the way for Miranda’s deeper involvement incommodity fetishization. While the idea of the child prodigy in “Two Kinds” in JoyLuck Club serves to satisfy the Chinese-American parents’ American dream ofassimilation and social climbing, the child prodigy’s performance in New KublaKhan is just one of the repetitive shows, bringing “uncontrollable” tears in someaudience while making Ian feel bored.Miranda’s trip from New Kubla Khan to the advertising firm, like Nu Wa’sfrom the factory district to the Land of Mist and Forgetfulness, is one of increasinginvolvement in the capitalist network. In the space for exotic display that NewKubla Khan is, Miranda’s performance can only be deceivingly self-satisfying: shefeels in her singing the presence of her long-lost mother, without knowing that“Aimee Ling” is evoked only to be betrayed by her. The real purpose of thisinvitation is to get her to sell, against the promise she made to her family, the rightsof using mother’s song in an advertisement. Her sellout seems to be coerced since,on the one hand, not being a Serendipity citizen, she cannot sue Withers against hisuse of the song without permission, and, on the other, Dr. Flowers is there chasingher. However, the self-justification she makes after being captured by Dr. Flowers,as well as her ensuing work in advertising, reveals more of her ideologicalcomplicity with consumerism: she denies the connection between promotion(advertisement) and factory exploitation (“I didn’t personally do anything to thosefactory workers, did I?”), and she comforts herself by thinking that the shoes willbring glamour to the bored suburban housewives and aging women, and that, tocounter the mother’s critique of the shoes’ glamour, “this time the immortal shoeswill make their wearers truly immortal” (202-3; emphasis added). Granted her needof a decent job for herself and her family, Miranda produces advertisements withideologies which run against her emerging revolutionary thinking, deny women’sautonomy (using the idea of female passivity to sell the perfume Trembling) andeven the value of memory (promoting the Pellas shoes as having “memory-proof” soles).

330 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336Thus presented in SFG’s hybridizing logic, the factories, New Kubla Khanand the advertising business are connected. The factories and New Kubla Khan, as amatter of fact, are two nodes in the two production lines of “commodities,” one inthe form of goods and the other, images. Thanks to the advertisements which useAimee’s fetishized images, her song, and Miranda’s slogans, moreover, the shoesget fetishized in commodity circulation to gain more exchange values—at theexpense of the workers producing the goods and the people being fixed by theimages. In the text, for instance, the Janitors and most of the Sonias aredehumanized and used as mere tools. The Ching family’s problems, on the otherside, are as much to do with Aimee’s self-pity as to do with her position as thedesirable but dispensable other, which first fixed her in front of the vanity mirror,and then, when used in the shoe advertisement, gets her husband fixed in a positionof mourning.New Kubla Khan can be connected with another exotic space which marks theclimax and turning point in Nu Wa’s migration: the bar with an opium den in it. NuWa’s migration story is a surreal condensation of the probable life experience of anillegal immigrant in the liminal spaces of a host country in the twentieth centuryand today, ranging from taking up a low-paid menial job of the hotel maid variety,profiting from telemarketing fraud and gambling rackets, to being involvedunknowingly in drug smuggling. 15 While Edwina, a foreign woman with healthyand “almost translucent” skin (123), embodies the beautiful illusion of hope offeredby the host nation, Nu Wa’s dilemma of remaining unemployed after herself-education in statistics bespeaks the reality of the host nation’s rejection ofimmigrants. The most curious aspect of her experience, for me, is her visit to theexotic and hybrid space of the bar, inside which there are a cage dancer, a wallcovered with garden fresco, and, in the center of this wall, a piece of thin blackgauze covering the opening to an opium den.Why does the text invoke the history of opium, a dark page in the histories ofChinese and Chinese diaspora, a past many of us Chinese diaspora, Lai included,see “in glimpses and glimmers that are, of necessity, so frightening or disgustingthat we run from them and embrace their opposites” (“Future Asians” 173)? Insteadof denying this dark history, Lai re-inscribes it in the text strategically to produce15 Telemarketing fraud is a contemporary problem occurring both in Canada and in Taiwan.Also, to compare Nu Wa’s experience with the typical jobs Chinese female immigrants have inthe period from 1860 to 1947—“merchants’ spouses, domestic slaves (mooi-tsai), serving girls(kei-toi-nui), and prostitutes” (Woon 85)—we can be sure that Nu Wa’s experience spans a longerperiod of the twentieth century up until the present.

Liu / Hybridization as the Postcolonial Anti-Exotic 331plural meanings. Far from being the center of “Chinese” evil and squalor, thisopium den is reconfigured in three ways. First of all, the whole space is not markedas “Chinese”: neither the exotic birdcage dancer, the painted garden, nor the maninside has an ethnic or Chinese mark. Secondly, it is not a space marked bypassivity or evil: the birdcage dancer, instead of just being a mere object of gaze,returns his “intent gaze” to guide Nu Wa to the opium place. Finally, we see in thecenter of this opium den not some Chinamen, but Edwina, the symbol of Americandream and the prime cause of Nu Wa’s degrading experience of exploitation andcrime in the capitalist machine. As a stigma in the history of Chinese diaspora, thisopium den can be placed in the crux of the international traffic of Asian immigrants,laborers, and the “exotic” goods and images they produce. In this broadened context,then, what Nu Wa tries to kill is more than Edwina and her “assured sense of . . .superiority” (146). Seen both in its textual and socio-historical context, the effortcan only be futile. Textually, with Edwina’s map Nu Wa can only go back to theChinese society to which she no longer belongs in terms of language, age andgender, but in which she is equally coerced into the traditional plot of “marriage andchildren vs. adultery and death.” In the text’s “historical” perspective, then, thelesbian genealogy is also a history of female exploitation, occurring in the hybridspaces of Canton factories, North American bar in the past, and the shoe factoriesand New Kubla Khan in Miranda’s time and suggesting that both labor exploitationof and exotic display of the Other simply recur in history.V. Hybridization as an On-Going ProcessAmidst the globalizing forces of multinational capitalism, our life world issimultaneously expanding and contracting, bringing the issues and “faces” ofotherness to our daily life. Both in the multicultural society of Canada and inTaiwan, the others—be they laborers, immigrants, ethnic minorities, or thosedifferent from “us” in terms of religion, political stance, sexual orientation, customs,and biological composition—constantly challenge our sense of “self” andboundaries, while the mixing of different cultures happen daily and everywhere.Exoticizing the others and their cultures in different forms of commodities seems tobe an easy way out: while we, in consumption, thought we comprehended theseaestheticized and fetishized differences, we are blind to the fact that the issues ofboundaries are matters of daily negotiation, and that there are always faces of theOther beyond our comprehension and challenging our cognitive and emotionalcapacities.

332 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336Against such logic of self-satisfying consumption of the others, SFG‘s“post-colonial anti-exotic” strategies “re-politicize” the “exotic” elements bytextualizing and hybriding them. The unfamiliar, or de-familiarized, elements in thetext, ranging from the mythic goddess Nu Wa, the Oriental spaces of New KublaKhan and the bar in the Land of Mist and Forgetfulness, to ethnic foods such asdurian and salt fish and exotic ornaments such as mask, exotic paper animals, areneither romanticized-fetishized nor decontextualized; instead, they are allmulti-contextualized so that their meanings get pluralized. Instead of weaving aconsistent system of imagery as modernist novelists do, Lai allows the images todiverge and multiply in meanings, the plotlines to bifurcate and convergerepetitively, just as various words and details take on multiple intertextualresonances. These strategies of hybridization, of course, do not undermine the text’slesbian cause; instead, it constructs a lesbian genealogy and sets it in the context ofinteracting social levels of business, technology and family relations. The text tracesthese power relations back and forth in history, in order to locate thoughts and“seeds” of resistance across time and suggest future possibilities.To relate the title of the opening chapter, Bifurcation, to the text as a whole,the word refers not only to the splitting of the human tail, but also to the dual plot ofNu Wa-Salt Fish Girl and Miranda-Evie, the failure and separation of the first paircompensated for and consummated by the child-bearing of the second. However,bifurcation does not happen just once in these major plotlines; the constructedlesbian genealogy is filled with intertexts and repetitions, while in both plotlinesthere are divergences caused by the characters’ differences from and betrayals ofeach other. Miranda’s ambivalence is shown in her worries about her job and herfears of Evie, who is “alien and dirty,” with “strange origins” and “odd sisters” (151,228). No wonder that with the birth of their baby, Miranda thinks that “[e]verythingwill be all right . . . until next time” (269), implicitly acknowledging the gapbetween the two of them, and the immensity of the system’s control.Bifurcation in SFG is actually an on-going process of hybridization, whichcan be manipulated and contained within the capitalist (multicultural) system ofcontrol—or an act of openness to and communication with differences. Besides apossible negative future, there is another negative ending in the text: Sonias’ failedsabotage, with many of them killed, their home base destroyed, and only a fewsurvivors running off to a place they knew. The union of Miranda and Evie acrossthe lines of class and “humanity” is no easy matter, just as Miranda does not “yet”recognize the Sonia group as her “family” (249). In a way, the text wants to ask us:what will happen “next time,” and what will happen to the survivors of the Sonia

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336 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 309-336About the AuthorKate Chiwen Liu is Associate Professor at the English department, Fu Jen University,Taiwan. Her areas of speciality are postcolonial Canadian novels, contemporary Canadianfilms, as well as postmodern and postcolonial theories with a focus on their urban and spatialconfigurations. She has published papers in Chinese on several Canadian novelists andfilmmakers, and is currently working on her English papers on Kerri Sakamoto and DionneBrand.Email: 034702@mail.fju.edu.tw[Received 16 Dec. 2008; accepted 26 June 2009; revised 13 Aug. 2009]